I exchanged views about ‘teacher effects’ with Harry Webb on his blogsite Webs of Substance in March. Harry referred to the MET project, and its question “What measure can we use to actually identify effective teaching?” I’ve reproduced my thoughts on using data to measure teacher effectiveness, and how I think a school could determine who its 'best' teachers are. I’d appreciate any further opinions you might have. I asked about Harry’s experience of tracking ‘teacher effects’. “How much of a relationship can you establish between a given teacher and the results their students get each year? Do the teachers you would view as the ‘best’ you have get the best results?” This lead to the following from Harry: “Common sense and the expectations of the public who fund government education would both see improved test scores e.g. in maths as indicative of good or improved maths teaching. I see no reason to disagree with this.” This was my response: “That answers my question – thanks for that. I’d suggest that, there may be a few other much more significant factors affecting results of tests, but many people would agree with you in saying, “Common sense and the expectations of the public who fund government education would both see improved test scores e.g. in maths as indicative of good or improved maths teaching. I see no reason to disagree with this.” I would argue that common sense and public expectations aren’t subject to rigorous analysis and don’t tell you much other than what people would like to be true. There appears to be very little evidence that teachers make a significant difference to children’s outcomes – even the Gates foundation raised doubts about being able to provide any evidence for this hypothesis and hedged their bets considerably. Judging a teacher on the results of their classes seems akin to judging a GP by the health of their patients.” At which point, Harry asked, “OK. So how would you determine who the best teachers are?” This was my response: “Well, to start with, I would hope that a senior management team would have a fairly good idea of the strengths and weaknesses in their team from their general work together. Secondly, it rather depends what ‘best’ means: Different schools will have different ideas about their teaching teams for a wide variety of reasons including length of tenure, specialisms, interests and overall needs of the school. One teacher might be best at supporting colleagues, another might be better working with either struggling or high-achieving children, and a third might be prepared to put in 100 hour weeks to run after school clubs and produce brilliant displays. Which is best? By working on the principle that some teachers are ‘better’ than others in an absolute sense, teachers are pitted against each other from the off. When did you last have a teacher who was brilliant at classroom presentation putting up displays in other teachers’ classrooms, or those great at using ICT to reduce workload helping others who struggle on that front? It simply doesn’t happen because of the false premise at the heart of ‘best teacher.’ Now that Ofsted have confirmed that they don’t grade lessons, and that they look at a snapshot of teaching style, “evidence about how teaching has improved, the quality of work seen in books, teachers’ marking, discussions with pupils and staff and, of course, test results and so on,” I’d look at my teaching staff in that light. Talk, discuss, read, develop together. Lesson observations should be a supportive process, to refer back to your blog post, and we would all be much better off if we ditched the high-stakes ‘performing monkey’ lessons, and turned the counter-productive 'performance management' system of appraisal into one which recognised that teachers are professionals who want to be part of the development of both themselves and the school in which they work. Pitting us against each other is a fundamentally bad idea, snapshot observations are subjective and basing decisions about management purely on data is not sensible. Everyone in a school has strengths and good management develops and utilises them effectively, surely?”

I agree that lesson observations and PRP are divisive and do little or nothing to improve the quality of teaching. Making a judgement based solely on results seems fair on the face of it - after all, results in line with or above student targets are surely indicative of 'good' teaching? Both models present major issues.

Judging the quality and effectiveness of a teacher is a real tough one. Each individual teacher has strengths and weaknesses precisely because it's a people-centred occupation. I've seen (and experienced) threshold applications denied at the whim of a headteacher with a different agenda. In a school that does not support its staff and throws all behaviour issues back at the classroom teacher, the 'best' teachers are doomed to failure based on results AND a traditional 'appraisal' approach.

Perhaps the decision regarding the quality of a teacher, and his or her fitness for moving up the payscale, should be based on results AND other criteria (as it pretty much is at the moment) but that the decision should be taken collaboratively, with more power in the hands of the member of staff's colleagues, HOD and SLT line-manager? Even so, if the teacher being judged is one who leaves as soon as possible - maybe because they have a young family - to continue their work post 8pm, how will the single colleague who arrives early and leaves late view them?

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Icing on the Cake

29/4/2014 08:21:53 am

Thanks for this, Sarah. I've not much to add than to say that, as you point out, teachers all have different lives and where and when they get their enormous workload done varies considerably. Linking so much to children's achievement in school, when this is arguably largely influenced by many factors other than the teacher, seems to be a spectacularly bad idea on the whole, as is the idea that data can tell you who the most effective staff in a school actually are!

A good place to find extensive and well informed discussion of teacher effectiveness studies is the Shanker Blog. For example this recent piece on a study on measuring teacher VA http://shankerblog.org/?p=9518. The blog is US based, which you may think causes a problem of relevance for our context, but badly shaped policies from there have an unpleasant habit of appearing here in due course.

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Icing on the Cake

5/5/2014 03:20:59 am

Thanks for this link and comment, Alex. I'm currently dipping into the Shankler Institute's blog and research at your suggestion.

I quite agree that a lot of the badly shaped policies we see here in England often originate in the US - something for further research. I've found some further interesting thoughts here: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/nov05/vol63/num03/Challenges_of_Value-Added_Assessment.aspx

This is really an interesting excerpt, the conversation is really informative. Ours is one among the best Montessori schools in Bangalore providing the most modern education system to entertain the children and make learning more interesting than ever.

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A Previously Rather Argumentative ex-Phase Leader Who Is Now Somewhat More Chilled Out

1/9/2014 02:51:31 pm

1. To paraphrase and summarise Andrew Old, the point of school is that kids get smart. Getting smarter means that you are able to understand ideas. Teachers are supposed to help kids get better at being smart. If you can't do this - you can't really be considered a good teacher. (http://teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/the-aim-of-education/)
2. Ok, I wouldn't judge a GP on how healthy his patients were but I would not like it if his patients ended up worse off after they'd seen him. I would judge him if he thought a cancer was actually a sore throat or if his prescriptions didn't sort a rash but worsened. I would rather not have a surgeon who had excellent handwriting and would substitute an amazing rapport with patients/bedside manner with being able to close up wounds with excellent stitching.
3. But I do really like you idea that it's stupid to narrowly define what a good teacher is. I think that is very useful - we should think more broadly about what kind of (teacher) skills make kids smarter.

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Jack Marwood

24/11/2015 10:52:24 pm

A rather belated reply, but here it is ;-)

1) I know that Andrew thinks that the purpose of school is to make children more clever. It would quite difficult, in my experience, to find a teacher who makes children less smart, because (as argued elsewhere) teacher input doesn't equal pupils output.
Additionally, some children are super-smart, super-diligent and super-hard-working and it seems odd that their teachers should take credit which is due to the child ;-)
2) Although I'm not that keen on the medical/teaching analogies in general, the key point in the teacher/student/GP/patient analogy is that teaching is effectively similar to the 'treatment', not the outcome.
Good teachers should be able to find good 'treatments' which enable children to learn effectively. But some patients have chronic problems, or chaotic lives, and so on, and GPs, like teachers, can only do so much. We need to stop expecting miracles...